The Deer Camp

by Dean Kuipers

  “Did the son of a bitch threaten you in any way? I’ll call the sheriff and we’ll have the asshole arrested!” he growled.

  “No, no, we worked it out. It’s fine. He went down the line, and the other guy’s up by the road. They were both okay about it in the end.”

  “Did he leave his stuff in the tree?”

  “No, I made him pull it down.”

  “But you didn’t see that deer.”

  “Nope. Not after all his racket. He started putting his shit up in the tree right exactly at the time the deer usually came through. I’m sure that buck is long gone.”

  “Well, God damn it!” Dad hissed. “We’re gonna go see Joe Carter.”

  He brooded at the kitchen table for a while and throttled his tea bag with the string and then got his winter clothes on and we drove over to see Mr. Carter, who insisted he had told these guys to stay out of our trees. Dad wasn’t satisfied.

  “You shouldn’t have to deal with that,” he said to me. “If you didn’t know the guy was there you could have shot him or something, or he could have shot you.”

  That evening, Dad sat in Desert Storm instead of me, and he continued to sit there the next few days, staring intently at the property line like a dog with a rival. The guy didn’t come back, but I don’t know what Dad would have done if he had. Maybe went over there all juiced up on the Holy Spirit and got an arrow in his ass. Either way, we didn’t change the name of the blind.

  When the loggers finally rolled up in April 2003, with their humongous, big-wheeled feller bunchers and a low-boy carrying a chipper the size of a railroad caboose, neither Dad nor Brett were there. Dad had a lot of meetings that week for Delta Design and Brett was busy with a bronze pour that couldn’t wait. The foundry was only him and a couple of other guys, so they couldn’t really do a casting without him. Both Dad and Brett said they wanted to be there, but I think the truth was neither man could bear to watch. They both denied it. But Brett had been demanding this for fourteen years, and really beating his head against a brick wall for five, and if that wall was crumbling he was wary about what was beyond it.

  Everything we were was in that sand. It didn’t seem obvious until suddenly the trees were coming off. I had said to Dad that it didn’t matter if this forestry gambit succeeded or not, but I knew it did. It was the entirety of our relationship in one gesture. Anger and blame and separation would grow out of that sand if nothing else did, and if Brett left, then Joe and I would probably fade away, too.

  For years, we’d monitored the fertility of that sand, and suddenly it seemed suspect. We’d obsessed about the composition of the habitat down to its finest detail, down to the health of our one scraggly hawthorn tree and a single tupelo we’d watched for a decade back by Gonzo and our one big Juneberry tree and a few stunted hazelnuts, down to making spot estimates of the white oak acorn fall, down to recording the numbers of whitetails and turkeys that came by in the weeks before any season was open, down to taking pH samples of the raw sand and hoping for a change of even a couple of tenths of a point to the base. We kept going back to the sand, spreading it on a flat palm and looking for evidence of any new organic matter, any new worm castings or bugs, any new indicator that our beautiful new fields of grass were changing the soil, that boot-top alfalfa was imminent, that new clover would be fixing nitrogen like pulling lightning out of the rheumy clouds. Every day we hoped that prime habitat was just a season or two away and that the animals were poised at the property lines waiting to stampede for it. We kept track of the grosbeaks and pine warblers, anticipating a songbird tsunami once the new habitat took off. What would any of this mean if the whole forest simply failed?

  Joe stayed at the cabin during the logging to make sure the men took only the trees within a cut area that the forester and Brett had marked with spray paint. The loggers worked mostly from the proposition that it was easier to ask for forgiveness than permission, and Joe ran from spot to spot waving them off trees we wanted to keep. I couldn’t be there, either, as I was prepping the launch of a new weekly alternative newspaper called Los Angeles CityBeat. The job of safeguarding our deer camp fell completely to Joe.

  Ayron had earned her MSW from Western the year before and had slid right into a great management job with another mental health provider, well paid, where she was overseeing patient clinical care. Joe felt like everybody else was too busy because they were doing better than he was. He’d already taken all the equity out of his house and used it to provide for his daughter. He didn’t care for the mental health field, but he couldn’t think of work that would be better. This logging business didn’t look so bad. At least they got to work outdoors. The sand farm needed him at this moment, and that felt good.

  Ayron thought it best that Brett had stayed away. “Too hot,” she said. “It’s just too loaded. If he and your dad had been there, Bruce would have been micromanaging everything. He’d have been stopping the guys every second and calling Nederveld to ask him whether to cut this tree or that one, when Nederveld was not the actual forester doing the job. He and Brett would have probably gotten into a fistfight or something.

  “Who else would care so much about this?” she added. “Seriously: Can you believe this shit goes on in your family?”

  Dad and Brett had put so much energy into this event, it was squeezing out the sides and running into other people’s lives. Some of the effects were just plain spooky. For instance, the forester who ended up laying out the cut and bringing in the loggers was named Randy Kuipers, and his boys were named Bruce and Brett. They weren’t directly related to us; they were just guys who worked with Nederveld and got the contract. So the resident Bruce and Brett stayed away while Randy and the Other Brett, who was still in high school, tore the hell out of the place. His little brother, Other Bruce, was too young at the time, but he did come out to the worksite. Do you see how every little world, every home, every worksite, is an irruption of the ecological unconscious?

  The Other Kuipers were like the arrival of pure Id. They did what we couldn’t. Their guys nuked the place. There is nothing even vaguely romantic about commercial forestry, nothing at all, even on the tiny, boutique-y scale of the seven or eight acres that they actually cut. They hauled ass around on hulking feller bunchers that ravaged the woods like a hatch of nightmare locusts, thirty-thousand-pound tractors each equipped with an all-in-one lumberjack arm that cozies up to an old yellow birch two feet in diameter and fifty feet tall, grabs it with horrible mandible-like pinchers, saws it off right at the ground, turns it horizontal and bucks it into sawmill-length sections or just carries it to the howling chipper, where it’s stuffed in stump-first and fifty or one hundred years’ worth of tree is reduced to sweet-smelling chips in seconds. With smaller trees, they “bunch” it with other trees they’ve already amputated, continuing to grab and cut trees until they have a full bunch for the whirling chipper blades.

  The fragrant softwood chips filled one trailer after another and were carried away by diesel-belching big rigs to be burned for electricity in a biomass plant over in McBain. Our climate change debt was going through the roof.

  When the Other Kuipers were done, the place was shattered. The heavy tractor tires tore the surface of the sand like a winter beach that had been bulldozed into berms against heaving storm surge. The bumps and scars of the place were revealed like a newly bald head, the shaved-bare earth dotted with ground-level stumps like so many thousands of white dining sets had been pressed into the sand, from saucers to turkey platters. This style of whole-tree-into-the-chipper logging meant they left little slash on the ground. When they craned the chipper onto its trailer and departed, the place was tore up but fairly clean.

  With one exception: per advice from Nederveld and orders from the Other Kuipers, the loggers cut a tiny hill of aspens just off the eastern end of Cabin Field, a little stand that swept down to a tiny 250-square-foot pond under tall cottonwoods, and they had left the slash on the ground for grouse cover. We were meant to leave
it lay there. It’s true that aspens will regenerate more quickly without the slash, as they are very shade intolerant, but it was left as an experiment, to see if this cover would eventually produce more birds. It would be hard to hunt for a couple of years, with thick slash tangling your legs, but then the rotting limbs would produce mushrooms and bugs and raspberry tangles and cover and everything grouse and woodcock like.

  Dad had driven up to see the last day of the logging and take a few photos, but he didn’t stay. A couple of weeks after the cut, when just enough of the psychic heat had radiated off into the cold spring nights, the resident Bruce and Brett walked the place with Joe to see the newly shaved face of reality. Dad was despondent beyond words. All he saw was ruin. He sagged here and there without saying much. He stopped often to lean against a remaining tree and heave heavy sighs. He’d found this place with his own brothers, who agreed with him that nothing should ever be touched, and now he’d gutted it. He was ashamed.

  Brett, on the other hand, was thrilled by the new browse that was sure to come exploding out of the ground. He was bursting to talk about the years to come, but he tempered his enthusiasm in deference to Dad. They toured in relative silence until they reached that little hill covered in popple slash. Dad started picking up branches and dragging them into piles.

  “We want to leave that, Dad,” said Brett.

  “We can’t just leave branches laying all over the place,” Dad said.

  “No, that’s the plan. Let it stand and decay. The grouse like it.”

  “We’ll just make some piles. That will be better,” Dad said, missing the point.

  So Brett and Joe joined in to make him feel better. Cleaning up the woods. Then they moved on to other spots and it turned into back-breaking work and took most of the day, which eventually turned hottish.

  “Dad, why are we doing this?” Brett said finally.

  “We’ll burn ’em,” Dad said.

  “We’re not going to burn anything! Christ!” Brett barked.

  “Rabbit piles, then,” Dad said quietly.

  Twelve

  Does Sand Dream of Trees?

  Dad and Diane were married in January 2004, in a simple ceremony in the Great Room of his house. The snow was banked up against the windows and flooded the room with a soft, flat light, through which bursts of sun slashed and beamed. Joe, Brett, and I were the only ones invited, other than the pastor from his church. We all showed up in nice suits, but as I walked up the stairs in Dad’s house, the soles ripped off my only pair of hard black dress shoes. They were nice but the soles had rotted off. I probably had twenty pairs of new hunting boots and running shoes that cost thousands, but I didn’t have dance shoes.

  With the gospel Bill Gaither Trio on Dad’s stereo, we weren’t going to be dancing anyway. Plus, we didn’t have dates. I don’t know about Diane’s sisters, but Ayron and Meg were pissed they weren’t invited. They didn’t really want to attend; they just wanted an invite. But Dad was one of Van Raalte’s children: always separate. Always excluding. He said he didn’t want the event to become a “circus.”

  “You wonder why I don’t go there anymore?” said Meg. “I really don’t need more of the hegemony. But I feel bad that Spenser missed out. Weddings are fun for kids.”

  We went to a restaurant after and Brett swung home and got Ayron. I wore my running shoes with my suit. In case I had to flee.

  “Thanks for letting me come to the dinner, Bruce,” Ayron said, smiling fiercely.

  In the spring, I got to spend a night at the cabin. I was on a reporting trip for my book Burning Rainbow Farm, which brought me to Michigan every few months for a couple of years. I had skipped deer season the year before because of the logging and Spenser starting preschool and my new job as deputy editor at Los Angeles CityBeat, and I hadn’t heard anything encouraging about the cutover fields. I knew there had been continued efforts to grow grass and deer plots, but no one seemed to talk about the trees and I just figured that the growth in the logged areas hadn’t been that good.

  I banged through the screen door of the cabin and into the mudroom with my bag, and before I could get a look at the early evening fields, Dad came in the slider. I took a deep breath. When I saw him, I realized that I had been expecting bad news about the Scots pines and aspens, that it had all gone to sand or produced a field of pure bull thistle or knapweed or something. I expected him to be a wreck.

  “My boy!” Dad exclaimed. Then he wrapped me in a big hug.

  “Hi Pop,” I said, preparing for a brief embrace. But he wouldn’t let go. We just stood there in a clench under the taxidermied head of Aunt Sally’s old buck and he said, “I love you,” and kissed the side of my face. The last time my father had kissed me was probably a quarter century earlier, when I was sixteen and he and I were both baptized before the congregation—which, for the record, had been Dad’s third baptism, a sprinkle-dunk-sprinkle suite that had to look a little suspect on the big board where they keep track of that kind of thing. Dad had a lot of things to be happy about that spring, first and foremost his wedding to Diane, and maybe it made him a little gushy. She had also been coaching him on being less rigid and less controlling, because she knew like we did that it was crippling him. Dad’s construction company, Delta Design, was at a real high point, too: only a few days before, he’d attended the ribbon-cutting on the 120,000-square-foot Kalamazoo Air Zoo, a giant aviation museum and the most high-profile public building he’d ever built.

  But something else was happening. Dad’s face was different, his shoulders, his posture. I’d never seen him so good in his own skin. It took me a minute. I kept thinking it was a matter of facial hair or a more fitted shirt or something but it eluded me.

  “It’s good to be here,” I said.

  “Oh, it is so good that you make the effort to get out here. It’s so important to your brothers. And look at this place, it’s just perfect.”

  All the blinds were up, the drapes pulled back, and the spring wind blew straight through the open windows to lift and drop the pull-cords against the wall over and over where they rattled like someone throwing dice on a table. The red oaks shook their catkins in the current and the tips of the pines glowed yellow-white as they heaved out their pollen cones and prepared to dust the swamps to the east. The coming twilight flowed cool and sweet all over the carpet.

  It hit me then that Dad had allowed the gap between him and those fields to close. At least for this moment. The forest pushed itself up against him and he didn’t grimace or constantly dust himself off or slam the windows shut. He was exposed, fully exposed, and he was turning his face into the breeze out of the southwest. He was letting it turn him. The pull-cords beat against the walls in a rhythm that mirrored the waves on the big lake pushed by this same wind. After a minute, he turned away from the windows to put water on for tea. Something in him had released.

  “If you can stay another day, the steelhead are still running in the Manistee,” he said. “Brett’s got most of the early planting done.”

  I could see sky to the west where the five acres of Scots pines had been. The low-angle sun shot through it and flared on the windows. Dad held up one finger and then he pointed out the tiny kitchen window toward the east, and we both stopped to listen to a grouse drumming on the old drumming log on the edge of the big swamp.

  When the thumping fluttered out, I said, “Let’s go look at those cuts. Is anything coming up?”

  “What?” said Dad, looking confused.

  “The Scots pine cut. The aspen cuts. How’s it looking?”

  “Oh, it’s great. There’s a whole new forest there.”

  “WHAT? Why didn’t anyone tell me?”

  “Oh, yeah, it all came up.”

  “Well, aren’t you overjoyed? You were so worried! Shit!”

  “I was never worried,” he said straight-faced. “Those cuts are going to fill in and be fabulous.”

  The way he said it, it sounded like false enthusiasm, like a form of denial. I
didn’t know how to take it. Dad was acting weird; he never said the word fabulous. He seemed a little unmoored. Maybe the logging had broken his mind. Maybe the spring, with the big building, the wedding, the new wing he’d put on his own house for Diane, had been too much for him. I tugged open the slider and we walked off the porch and started out there.

  The old relief surged through the soles of my boots. Through the glare from the west, beyond the red pines, I could make out the shapes of Joe, Brett, and Ayron as they came out of the cutover fields. A lone bullfrog whomped from the ditch. Oak pollen rained past in a sideways current visible in the sun’s hard glow, and cottonwood seeds floated on it like tiny puffs of breath. The radiance out there was choked with a passing traffic of insect, spore, and seed. When we met in the red pines, there were hugs all around, but I was madly distracted by what was going on ten yards away in that field.

  Brett followed my gaze and said, “You better come out here and see.”

  We walked across the two-track and into the Scots pine cut and Dad and Ayron were laughing together as I stopped there with my mouth open. “It’s comin’ in pretty good,” said Brett as he bent down to examine a sapling.

  One- to two-foot-tall sapling trees stood thick like a field of grass, thousands and thousands of them, glowing incandescent green and yellow-white and magenta where they jutted up through the bracken fern and knapweed and foxtail. The new trees were backlit by the last of the spring sun and caught midleap as they busted out of the sandy earth. The dinner-plate-sized stumps were barely discernible, turned gray and brown by winter, buried under the flags of new saplings. Just about every inch of orange, pine-needled sand displayed new trees.

  Tallest among them were the hand-sized, heart-shaped leaves of aspen saplings. But right alongside were new Scots pines and volunteer saplings of red and white oak, black cherry, beech, red pine, paper birch, red maple, sugar maple, yellow birch, a few white pines, even the odd Norway spruce that had migrated over from trees Vern had planted around First Field. We hadn’t planted a thing. This was all the colonizing work of bird and wind and squirrel and root sucker, and the five acres were packed with new life.